Rural-urban rhythms: Hierarchy in commuting of mobile phone users in Slovakia

Abstract

While contemporary life may seem unpredictable, people still follow regular routines, creating stable patterns of movement. These patterns, captured through mobile positioning data, offer new insights into the daily rhythms of population presence at various scales. By analysing passive records from ∼1.3 million mobile phone users, the study examines variability in population presence across the centre–periphery continuum, identifies differences in daily routines throughout the week, and explores the impact of accessibility on these rhythms. The synthesis of the findings leads to the creation of the rural–urban rhythms model, which forms the basis for classifying municipalities into nine categories. The analysis reveals distinct spatial patterns of rhythmicity influenced by functional hierarchy, accessibility, and the interplay between daily commuting and weekend (recreational) mobility. Urban centres and industrial hubs are characterised by weekday concentration and significant weekend outflow, while suburban municipalities show patterns of daily commuting with partial weekend depopulation. In contrast, peripheral municipalities experience weekday outmigration but gain population presence on weekends, often due to second-home users or returning weekly commuters. Certain categories, such as tourism- and transit-oriented municipalities, which experience an influx of people on weekdays and even more so on weekends, demonstrate azonal, localised, resource-specific spatial distribution. A key finding of the paper is that a characteristic feature of the spatial differentiation of daily rhythms in Slovak municipalities is a tendency toward zonality, observed in most of the identified categories. It is clear that the degree of urbanisation of a municipality and its position on the centre–periphery continuum play a crucial role in shaping this zonality.